Embrace DevOps for smarter teams

05 February 2019 @ 09:21

DevOps, like digital transformation, is a term that has become part of the buzzword bingo many in IT like to play. However, not everyone understands the intricacies around it.

At its core, DevOps is designed to help organisations reliably build, test, and release software. But it's a change of mindset that truly helps to achieve this. While many people think that applying the term DevOps will magically fix everything or get allocated budget is in for a serious wakeup call.

Beyond the catchphrase

KEEP C. A. L. M. S. AND CARRY ON

Each organisation or individual does DevOps in their own way.

However, there are a few main ideas that people tend to agree on.

Culture

Peter Drucker said: "Culture eats strategy for breakfast."

The culture of DevOps takes time for a team to develop mutual respect, trust, and establish open communication. Having a team is critical to achieving great things.

Culture isn't about a console in the office, free massages or pizza on Fridays. It's how treat you team mates in the good and the bad.

Even if it is helping a colleague to get over imposter syndrome. Serving one another in your team is a great way to build great team.

Automation

Automate the things.

From code deploys to logging tickets, machines are better at boring menial tasks than humans.

Try and see what can be automated, once you start, the possibilities are endless.

Learn

Robert Mauer in his book 'The Spirit of Kaizen' speaks of small incremental changes that you can introduce to make things run smoother and faster. These don't have to cost money. Every little time saver or optimisation collectively amounts to big chunks of work getting done.

Measurement

Probably the most controversial thing in any organisation is measuring performance – either services or people. Here we are talking about trying to have metrics for everything, how many interactions with a customer, how many incidents are related to service, how many alerts are your on-call person receiving, Alert Fatigue is real. In the future, PTSD studies will be conducted for people who spent time on-call.

Sharing

When you were a kid, one of the first things that you learnt was sharing is the right and nice thing to do. Sharing is caring.

As an adult, we tend to build islands and silos, not sharing what we've learnt, keeping things for yourself. You could think you are hero when something breaks and you save the day. You will be hated and resented. You are the bottleneck.

Don't be that person.

Make it easy for new people to be onboarded, share what you know in a Wiki or Knowledge base.

The Journey

So much left to know, and I'm on the road to find out…

Cat Stevens sang "I was once like you are now, and I know that it's not easy, To be calm when you've found something going on, But take your time, think a lot, Why, think of everything you've got, For you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.”